za3tar

God! I hate people who display a “big effort” while they are eating or chewing. I hate it when some people chew gum with open mouths or loudly. It is so freaking annoying! I hate it when people breathe heavily or make “internal grunting sounds” that you would associate with hard physical labour or terrible illness yet they have done nothing and are totally fine! And I specially hate it when the person right next to me does that for half an hour straight!

Pfft!

I was browsing online when I accidentally stumbled upon this site: http://www.israellawcenter.org/Missions-general-information.html (link not added purposefully).

Apparently this organization takes tourists on some sort of live military tour where they penetrate illegally occupied territories and sit in on courts of Palestinian captives.

Screenshot of the “tour highlight” !!

What year is this? Are we back in Roman times where Christians where being fed to lions in front of the cheering crowds? Are the destroyed lives and the misfortunes of the occupied people of Palestine a tourist attraction to this organization? Seriously, this is so barbaric!

This is indeed rediculous. Not only that, but i also hate it when services require you to sign up with a username & password even if you just want to try that service for a brief time. Too many user accounts online, ultimately you run out of memorizable unique passwords, and sharing passwords or using a service-dependent naming scheme is not wise. Check out this website for a neat tool btw.

In these days (and specially if the whole “cloud-as-a-service” model is to become successful, oh and it will) we should have a concept of a single global account, or a managable federation of accounts that form a global account, that would allow people to “turn on” services on the web to try them out (or use them), and then “turn them off”.

I know about openID, but having a single account (be it from Google or Microsoft or Yahoo) to log in to many places is too “big-brothery” for my taste. Plus, not all online services allow users to use openID, even though they really should.

It is bollocks! Bollocks I tells ya! *shaking his fist*

… Israeli consul to the US Reda Mansour. Today on CNN, after a report on the civilian casualties in Gaza, and with a split screen next to him showing civilians dead and injured in hospitals and a huge explosions in Gaza due to the Israeli bombardment; he had the audacity to claim that he did not believe there was a lot of death in Gaza. He openly claimed that the Palestinians are exaggerating in their casualties, and that the actual number of casualties was less than half of what was reported!! Keep in mind that the report mentioned 400 casualties (as if 200 casualties is justifiable). When the anchor confronted him that the numbers were coming from Palestinian and U.N. sources, he still refused to acknowledge the amount of death and destruction his country is inflicting and stuck by his claim.

I will post a video of this heartless “person” once i find a copy online.

This news site never fails to surprise me.

So there you have it ladies and gentlemen; the third headline is about a SImpsons episode, and the fourth headline is about a Facebook group against coloured Kuffiyehs !! However, they did not include their usual “sex headline” .. maybe because it is Hajj season.

Come on Al Arabiya, yes not all your news have to be political, but please prioritize and separate things correctly. I can hardly see why would you ever report a Facebook group on your front page!

Honestly, it it seems to me that Al Arabiya always tries to play to a target audience of highly emotional people. So if they want to have them feel happy, they would report a trivial non-news happy issue (like: the last Simpsons episode contained a none terrorist Muslim Arab). If they want to stir up Lebanese/Palestinian flame war, they would report on a regional non-issue (like: A Palestinian Facebook group protesting against coloured Kuffiyehs in Lebanon). If they want to get the audience buzzing for a while, they would report one of their usual sex items (examples are too many to list).

Come on Al Arabiya, you can report what ever you want, but please put everything in its correct place. I bet there is something happening regionally, in the Arab world, or globally that is more interesting than a Facebook group or a Simpsons episode.

Also, by the way Al Arabiya, the “right wing channel” was not airing an episode to “defend Islam”. It was talking about intolerance and prejudging people (American Muslims in this case) of being terrorists. So that episode was tackling issues of stereotyping Americans Arabs and Muslims rather than “defending Islam”. This is just another example of how Al Arabiya plays into an emotional audience.